Published 4:00 am, Friday, December 29, 2006

After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded Thursday that milk and meat from some cloned farm animals are safe to eat. That finding could make the United States the first country to allow products from cloned livestock to be sold in grocery stores.

Even if the agency's assessment is formally approved next year, consumers will not see many steaks or pork chops from cloned animals because the technology is still too expensive to be used widely.

But the FDA's draft policy touched off an immediate storm of criticism from consumer groups, as well as some cautious concerns from meat and dairy companies worried about consumer reaction.

Elementary school in Oakland opens time capsule from 1927San Francisco Chronicle

Brides of March walk through San FranciscoSan Francisco Chronicle

WildCare rescues Western scrub jay from rodent glue trapWildCare

The Regulars: The CarpenterJessica Christian

"At the end of the day, FDA is looking out for a few cloning companies and not for consumers or the dairy industry," said Joseph Mendelson, legal director for the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group.

Mendelson and other consumer representatives argue that the science backing the FDA's decision is shaky and that consumer surveys show that most people are opposed to cloning animals, let alone eating the clones.

Opponents hope to have congressional pressure derail the policy before it becomes final or at least to require that such foods be labeled so consumers can choose to avoid them. FDA officials said that it was unlikely that labeling would be required because food from cloned animals is indistinguishable from other food, although a final decision about labeling has not been made.

Related Stories

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Thursday called for a "careful, deliberative and open process" before cloned animals are approved for food.

The FDA's finding comes more than six years after the agency first decided to study the matter, after recognizing that the advent of cloned farm animals raised a food safety issue. After that study, the agency in 2003 gave a tentative approval to cloned animals for food. But the FDA retreated after its own advisory panel found there was insufficient scientific backing for that conclusion.

This time, FDA officials said they had substantial new data, which they presented Thursday in a nearly 700-page "draft risk assessment."

The assessment concluded that milk and meat from cloned cows, pigs and goats, and from their offspring, were "as safe to eat as the food we eat every day," said Stephen Sundlof, the FDA's chief of veterinary medicine.

Sundlof said that by law the agency could consider only the scientific issues, not consumer demand or the ethics of cloning.

While animal cloning has always been legal, since 2001 there has been a voluntary moratorium on selling milk or meat from such animals to give the FDA time to study the issue. Some experts say that some products from clones or their offspring have probably nonetheless made their way into the food supply.

The moratorium will stay in place until the new policy is completed, following a 90-day period for public comment and additional time for the FDA to review the comments. Sundlof said he could not say when the final policy would be ready, though it might be by the end of 2007.

Even then, the moratorium would remain for products from sheep, the FDA said, because there was not enough evidence of their safety. No one has yet succeeded in cloning chickens or other poultry.

The finding was hailed by cloning companies, which have been struggling to build a business. It also drew praise from some farmers and breeders who have already made clones of their prized livestock but have had to pour milk down the drain and keep their meat off the market.

They say that cloning is just another breeding technique, like artificial insemination or in-vitro fertilization.

"This just sort of lifts the stigma of the clones," said Bob Schauf, a Holstein breeder and dairy farmer in Barron, Wis., who had two of his prized cows cloned. He said his family and the families of his employees have been drinking the milk from those clones rather than see it go to waste. But dairy marketers have expressed concern.

A survey conducted last summer by the International Dairy Foods Association, an industry trade group, found that 14 percent of women would turn away from all dairy products if milk from clones was introduced into the food supply. The association surveyed women because its research has found them to be the main household decision makers on dairy products.

The American Meat Institute, while saying Thursday that cloning was safe, also urged the FDA to be cautious about approval "if most consumers are unwilling to accept the technology."

A poll this month from the nonprofit Pew Initiative for Food and Biotechnology found that while most consumers knew little about animal cloning, 64 percent said they were uncomfortable with it.

FDA officials said no other country had yet approved food from cloned livestock, although some are considering it. That raised the prospect that American exports of milk or meat could be blocked by certain countries if they contain products from cloned animals.

That raises the possibility that some food companies will label their products "clone-free," just as some now label milk as not coming from cows injected with growth hormone.

The draft assessment based its conclusions on an extensive review of scientific literature on cloning as well as on studies, some done by cloning companies, comparing the composition of the milk, meat and blood of cloned animals and conventional animals.

Sundlof said the agency also found that cloning "poses no unique risks to the health of animals" beyond those seen with other forms of assisted reproduction such as in-vitro fertilization. The frequency of problems is higher with cloning, however, perhaps because it is a newer technology. The first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, was born in 1996 at a Scottish research center.

Industry officials estimate there are now only about 500 or 600 cloned cows in the United States, out of tens of millions of beef and dairy cows. There are roughly 200 cloned pigs.

Experts say that cloning is too expensive to be used to make animals only to then grind them into hamburger or even to milk them. Rather, farmers and breeders are cloning prized livestock so they can then be used for breeding using more conventional means of reproduction.

That means that most food from cloning would come from the sexually produced offspring of the cloned animals. The FDA said that milk and meat from such offspring were safe, because any abnormalities in clones do not carry into the next generation.

Michael Pollan, a UC Berkeley journalism professor whose bestselling book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" discusses the weaknesses of the U.S. industrial food system, said cloning animals for their meat and milk would be one step further "down the path that's gotten us into big trouble in agriculture -- monoculture."

Cloning would bring more uniformity to the genetics of commercial beef and dairy herds, said Pollan. "And wherever you have a monoculture, it's exquisitely vulnerable to all kinds of shocks, in this case disease. To keep a paddock full of genetically identical animals healthy would take more drugs. This seems like a big thing for the pharmaceutical industry more than anyone."

A big point of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is that feeding cattle an unnatural diet of corn has promoted the growth of lethal E. coli in their guts -- which has become a problem for produce as well as meat.

The bottom line on cloning, Pollan said: "Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should do it."